More than 10 years ago, it was realized that airbags and other forms of passive safety were not likely to save a large portion of the more than 40,000 fatalities that were still occurring annually on roadways in the United States and the 1.2 million annual fatalities worldwide. It was thought that in order to solve this problem, the operation of road vehicles had to be converted to a process from a project. A project by nature has uncertainty. A project is something that is new and which has never before been done and therefore it can be expected that events will arise which will delay the project, increase its costs, and/or cause the project to completely fail.
Modern manufacturing is based on the premise that the manufacture of a product is a process. The process should be designed to manufacture the product over and over again going through the same steps and therefore there should be no uncertainty. In manufacturing, one frequently hears the phrase “100% good parts, 100% of the time”. This view of manufacturing began with Deming and was used by Japan to propel it to be one of the highest quality manufacturing country in the world. This concept has now been more fully developed in the Six Sigma® methodology wherein realizing that whereas no process is in fact perfect, it is nevertheless the goal of a process to continue to reduce the variation around a nominal value so that it trends toward perfection where failures are measured in parts per million.
This thinking led to the concept of the Road to Zero Fatalities® or RtZF®, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,370,475, 6,405,132, 7,085,637, and 7,202,776, among others, which is a project of Intelligent Technologies International, Inc. to achieve a process for driving automobiles that tends toward perfection through eliminating vehicular accidents. In devising a suite of technologies for RtZF®, those technologies that had the capability of approaching perfection were chosen. Similarly, in manufacturing, a machine or sub-process that was known to produce a bad part 1% of the time is not selected for use. Similarly, in choosing a suite of technologies, a technology that would not work successfully ˜100% of the time would not be selected for use. For example, the use of vision systems as the primary technology to guide a vehicle down a roadway was discarded early in the development since the roadway is not always visible. Specifically, in the presence of fog, rain and snow, it is frequently impossible to see the lane markers on a road and on most roads on which accidents occur, the lane markings are defective and/or absent.
The Road to Zero Fatalities® system has received positive responses from all those to whom it has been presented but, primarily for political reasons, its implementation has been slow. Although one major automobile manufacturer has adopted this concept as their corporate plan, unfortunately the Federal Highway department is committed to another approach involving placing DSRC transceivers along the roadways in the United States. One opinion is that they have chosen an infrastructure intensive solution because the FHWA needs such a project to justify their ongoing existence. Now that the 50,000 miles of the federal highway system have been constructed, the FHWA is in search of a project to keep their employees employed. The program that is planned is to place DSRC receivers periodically on all of the federal highways in the United States. This would essentially be a construction of a mini-ubiquitous network that could compete, for example, with WiMAX or other ubiquitous internet systems that are rapidly moving toward widespread deployment in several countries around the world. The costs of this project for the federal highway system is in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars and would require a significant ongoing maintenance expense. There are not believed to be any plans to place these transponders on the remainder of the 4.2 million miles of roadway where the majority of the fatal accidents occur, primarily because the cost would be astronomical.
In light of the foregoing, a comprehensive safety system is needed as an intermediate step which will prevent vehicular accidents and even if such accidents occur, prevent injuries from arising from such accidents until the RtZF® can be deployed. Although the entire system is briefly described herein, the focus of this disclosure will be limited to one part of the system, namely film airbags.
All of the patents, patent applications, technical papers and other references mentioned anywhere herein are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety. No admission is made that any or all of these references are prior art and indeed, it is contemplated that they may not be available as prior art when interpreting 35 U.S.C. §102, 103 in consideration of the claims of the present application.